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I'm guessing nobody is going to serve him in your KKK town. Not sure why he would stick around there though.
He could leave or take his chances. He could work outside his area to develop relationships to exert pressure on your fictional grand wizards within the town somehow. I'm not sure how but I'm not his daddy so I can't solve his problems for him.
Have I indulged you enough? I mean...you do realize that 85% of the population isn't just a tick away from becoming Hitler, right?
No fair. You can't take the easy way out. Philosophers, economists, and political and religious leaders have struggled for centuries over questions like this as societies evolved from governments ruled by autocratic absolute rulers to enlightened rulers to various forms of representative democracies. And we're still fighting over the answers.
Why are your "property rights" held to be more important than "personal rights"? Both can be said to hold some essential value in a successful society. Get rid of property rights and you have Communism, a failed economic model. Get rid of personal rights and you have authoritarianism, a model equally reprehensible.
What government does is to regulate the essential "tension" between property and personal rights. You are correct, absolutely, that the only way to make your argument work is to be against all state regulation and government. And here you are being intellectually honest. We just disagree (more, later) ...
I'm not sure what you mean by personal rights, but if it's a right, that means it should never be violated for any reason. Rights don't conflict with each other, so no need to balance anything.
Technically, all rights are property rights. Property/Ownership is the exclusive rights to something, and it all begins with yourself - Self-ownership. Each person owns themselves and no one else. Nobody else has a right to "you" (that's slavery). Property rights then extend from that...if you create something with your own time and effort or homestead it (the first to use something previously unowned), it belongs to you and no one else. You can also trade property with others or receive it as a gift. Those are the only legitimate ways to own something. If you acquire something by force or fraud, you've violated somebody's property rights.
So that's the basic philosophy behind property. I actually never chose to have the views I have...it was a conclusion. I was forced to change my mind because I couldn't argue with the logic, and I can't stand to be knowingly inconsistent or dishonest.
The thing is, that rules out government. I can't accept solutions that violate what I believe are the fundamental principles of a civil society - Don't bring violence into a non-violent situation, and don't steal or commit fraud.
So...I started looking at alternatives and I now firmly believe society will not only function without a central coercive authority, but will be vastly improved in most areas over time.
T0103E - Believe the quotes are correct and all yours - my apologies if not.
Your thoughts on government are interesting and I'll respond more later but in the interim a few thoughts on morality since talk of one leads to the other.
I appreciate that you're open-minded and respectful, so I'm giving a more detailed response than I normally would because I feel like you'll take the time to read it.
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We use terms derived from the American Revolution (life - liberty - property - and the like) even though their meaning has changed over the years and may have had different connotations to the Founding Fathers. For example, liberty doesn't necessarily mean that you should be free to do whatever you'd like even with your property. An alternate interpretation of the word liberty that may have influenced some of the writers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution is that individuals can be harmed by collective society (Rosa Parks not being able to get that front seat on the bus?) and it is a role of government to protect their freedom or their "liberty."
That's why definitions are very important to establish. Whatever word you want to use for it, I believe that every individual has rights that should never be violated for any reason. Every person should be allowed to do whatever they want, as long as they aren't initiating force or violating property rights (see my last post). That doesn't mean that all of those actions will be good, but they shouldn't be punished as a criminal for it. That's the distinction. When is it justified to use force against someone?
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Here, I know you disagreed with George Washington's view that, “Virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government” (or you can’t have a free society where every man is out for himself). It IS a very Rousseau-like concept (the social contract) in that there is an expectation that a people recognize there is a common good or public interest and that every citizen should contribute to this common good even if it is against their personal self-interest. This admittedly is a "progressive" way of thinking that pretty much puts a baker in the position of serving every customer.
The problem is when it conflicts with individual rights. There are no collective or group rights. Everyone has the same rights - the rights I mentioned earlier - and it's never acceptable to violate those rights.
Now here's a very key concept...people can, and have been many times, swayed by people in power to sacrifice individual rights to serve 'the common good', or 'society as a whole'. This is collectivism, and it plays off of people's desire to do good.
I watched a great documentary on how authoritarian regimes come into power, and they showed how it's always the same fundamental message: Give up some of your rights and we will make society what it should be. Hitler's prime minister of propoganda (Goebbels) said that people must submit the "I" to the "thou"...the individual to the whole. Mao Tse Tung said we should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than any individual. I've heard Hillary Clinton say similar things, and I'm keeping an eye out for Trump falling into this trap as well.
Do you see the twist there? They aren't saying people should voluntarily choose to help people. They're saying that the rights of the individual should be DISREGARDED if it will accomplish some societal goal. That reasoning was accepted when the Nazis threw the Jews in concentration camps, to use an obvious example.
I say that the ends never justify the means, and that's the excuse for tyranny every time.
Quote:
Your disagreement with that philosophy is not to say that you are not a moral person or that you think there's no role for morality in society for you refer to "right and wrong" and "the right thing."
You said:
I believe you're saying that our sense of right and wrong is derived from underlying culture-driven expectations with the majority view holding sway. Here, I pretty much agree with you although we should probably add that the majority view can be manipulated or intimidated say by religious authorities and I've no issue with labelling cultural dysfunction such as ISIS as evil.
SO, we both acknowledge there are societal expectations (call them morality or not) and here you appear to accept that society can impose those expectations on the individual for you refer to "laws" about rape. Where we differ is how this process works or on how the interconnection of society and the individual is managed - in other words, on *government.*
Now here you may say something that you don't quite mean or: . Since you bring up rape as not being morally allowed, please, please let's not put law enforcement in the category of a not-needed government entity and send EveryLady to self-defense classes.
This is the part most people have an issue with. It's hard to comprehend having societal rules without a rul-ER. The reason I call myself an anarchist is because I believe in the true meaning of the word: An (no), arch/archon (ruler). No rulers. There can be rules without anyone being a ruler - ruler being someone who is allowed to initiate force and violate property rights. A ruler NECESSARILY has to do things that are immoral if done by the rest of society. I'm saying nobody has the right to do immoral things.
Finally, you don't have to worry about self-defense classes . There's nothing wrong with protection services, security, neighbors looking out for each other, being armed, having home security measures, or whatever people come up with. One idea I like for anti-theft is fingerprint access or retina scanning for valuable electronics, cars, etc. Lots of innovation can be made if the incentive is there.
Well, Podo...
No one is immune from heart attack. Women die from them as frequently as men, and not all of either gender who keels over smokes or is fat.
You could be thunderstruck, and when it hits you, it will be your heart attack alone. Personally, I don't mind kicking in my few pennies that would help your recovery, because the next to fall could be me. I would hope you would do the same for me, even if it was not mandatory.
Our better angels have guided the most of us for a very long time now, and I hope they're still sitting on our shoulders these days, just like they were on my ancestor's shoulders.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. And you're right - I did spend time thinking of what you wrote!!!
The thread topic is healthcare - where the word "right" is frequently used even though admittedly the word can have various definitions. The first response to the OP was: "Are you saying people have a right to stolen money in the first place?" which seemed to define the word "right" solely in terms of money or "property rights." You also say that "[t]echnically, all rights ARE property rights." In the healthcare threads, the normal response to this argument is that the property could not be acquired or money earned without government-maintained entities making owed taxes not really the property of the earner. But, as an anarchist, you do not accept the existence of government and so that approach is moot.
Later, though, you write that
Quote:
every individual has rights that should never be violated for any reason ... every person should be allowed to do whatever they want, as long as they aren't initiating force or violating property rights. That doesn't mean that all of those actions will be good, but they shouldn't be punished as a criminal for it.
Here, you seem to extend the concept of rights beyond the material. Some of the threads on health care disintegrate when those opposing caring for someone with a heart attack even if fat and a smoker are by thread-end willing to say something to the effect that "it's fine with me that babies are left to die in the street if their parents who are the ones responsible refuse care."
But I don't think that you would go there for you still accept the concept of "societal rules" and I believe it was you in another thread (though I could be wrong) who once referred to believing in the "right to health care." Where we differ is when you write: "It's hard to comprehend having societal rules without a ruler." And you are right - that I cannot comprehend. You seem to look to technology ... voluntary organizations ... consensual agreements to bring about a functional society. Within the context of healthcare, a logical turn could be to look at healthcare costs, insurance and the like but there have been lots of posts on those details and we'd simply get bogged down in the details when the real issue is your moral objection to the concept of government or, in your terms, collective force.
Here you object saying that if individuals have no right to steal then the collective does not - even IF the collective is based on the desire of people to do good. Your objection lies, if only in part, on past examples where movements have exploited that well-intended but naive desire resulting in authoritarian regimes (example Mao Tse Tung). My response would be that one of the reasons for the failure of these regimes was an inadequate underlying philosophy. To continue the example of Mao Tse Tung, communism, in the end, proved to not explain either human nature or economic growth.
Would anarchy fare any better? Do we know? My interest lies more in history and culture than philosophy and so I tend to think in those terms. You also wrote in this thread that "it's funny to me when people say taxes are the price of civilized society." To me, the two are virtually synonymous. Man first organized in groupings of hunters and gatherers that, in contrast to what was to come, were surprisingly egalitarian. They may well have functioned in a way that you'd label anarchist. The advent of agriculture and settled communities made it possible to accumulate surplus. The organizational demands of agricultural led to a need for an overclass (the first "elite") that drew from the labor of others. The food surplus also supported religion, education, the arts - the very characteristics of what we define as civilization.
Moreover, the "individual rights" that we all agree are desirable did not exist for most historical periods. Absolute tyrannical rulers gave way to absolute but enlightened rulers which then evolved into democracies although certainly there have been modern-day eruptions of authoritarians regimes based on corrupt philosophies like Fascism and Communism. I mentioned a tension between "property" and "personal" rights that now seems confusing (even to me). A better construct might be the tension between the "state" (the collective) and the "individual." To me, the two factors are on a continuum. Clearly, history has moved past - at least in some modern countries - one end of the continuum finding that absolute tyranny does not function to the benefit of the majority who have gained power; you advocate for the far side of the continuum (anarchy).
To my knowledge, there's been no historical or existing society that functioned using anarchical principals. You may see that continuum as one where it's desirable for humans to progress from one end to the other. I do not. In an earlier post, you indicated disagreement with a portion of what the Founding Father's wrote saying they:
Quote:
generally agreed on the idea of individual rights. They had a lot of the concepts completely correct, but didn't take them to their logical conclusions. They believed that government was just there to protect it's citizens and their property...except for when they take their property by force through taxation, or later, things like eminent domain.
Again, like them I would not move the pointer all the way to the right, where there are only individual but no collective rights. Like them, I accept the concept of taxation and the government that taxation supports. Why? Certainly the philosophers read by the Founding Fathers considered questions like human nature-and here I'd probably mimic them. Then, again, point to history. Certainly there remains enormous room for disagreement exactly WHERE on the continuum the optimal individual/government balance can be found (contrast the US with Europe) and how and in what amounts the taxes are to be assessed. Cultural factors play a large role in how any one country answers that question. But once the concept of taxation is accepted, the answer is only a matter of degree.
So I'd answer YES to this question "Are you saying people have a right to stolen money in the first place?" (that was NOT your response, I know) in connection with: Does someone who's fat and smokes have a "right" to my taxes when they have a heart attack?
Last edited by EveryLady; 01-21-2017 at 04:40 PM..
No, he doesn't have right to your taxes but he has a right to healthcare.
If you deny some people healthcare based on whether you think they deserve it, you are implementing the very thing the Republicans howled about - a death panel. You are discriminating against certain people based on some arbitrary criteria and that should never happen. It is not up to us to judge who is worthy of care.
This is easily one of the most ridiculous statements I've ever read in my life.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. And you're right - I did spend time thinking of what you wrote!!!
The thread topic is healthcare - where the word "right" is frequently used even though admittedly the word can have various definitions. The first response to the OP was: "Are you saying people have a right to stolen money in the first place?" which seemed to define the word "right" solely in terms of money or "property rights." You also say that "[t]echnically, all rights ARE property rights." In the healthcare threads, the normal response to this argument is that the property could not be acquired or money earned without government-maintained entities making owed taxes not really the property of the earner. But, as an anarchist, you do not accept the existence of government and so that approach is moot.
Later, though, you write that Here, you seem to extend the concept of rights beyond the material. Some of the threads on health care disintegrate when those opposing caring for someone with a heart attack even if fat and a smoker are by thread-end willing to say something to the effect that "it's fine with me that babies are left to die in the street if their parents who are the ones responsible refuse care."
But I don't think that you would go there for you still accept the concept of "societal rules" and I believe it was you in another thread (though I could be wrong) who once referred to believing in the "right to health care." Where we differ is when you write: "It's hard to comprehend having societal rules without a ruler." And you are right - that I cannot comprehend. You seem to look to technology ... voluntary organizations ... consensual agreements to bring about a functional society. Within the context of healthcare, a logical turn could be to look at healthcare costs, insurance and the like but there have been lots of posts on those details and we'd simply get bogged down in the details when the real issue is your moral objection to the concept of government or, in your terms, collective force.
Here you object saying that if individuals have no right to steal then the collective does not - even IF the collective is based on the desire of people to do good. Your objection lies, if only in part, on past examples where movements have exploited that well-intended but naive desire resulting in authoritarian regimes (example Mao Tse Tung). My response would be that one of the reasons for the failure of these regimes was an inadequate underlying philosophy. To continue the example of Mao Tse Tung, communism, in the end, proved to not explain either human nature or economic growth.
Would anarchy fare any better? Do we know? My interest lies more in history and culture than philosophy and so I tend to think in those terms. You also wrote in this thread that "it's funny to me when people say taxes are the price of civilized society." To me, the two are virtually synonymous. Man first organized in groupings of hunters and gatherers that, in contrast to what was to come, were surprisingly egalitarian. They may well have functioned in a way that you'd label anarchist. The advent of agriculture and settled communities made it possible to accumulate surplus. The organizational demands of agricultural led to a need for an overclass (the first "elite") that drew from the labor of others. The food surplus also supported religion, education, the arts - the very characteristics of what we define as civilization.
Moreover, the "individual rights" that we all agree are desirable did not exist for most historical periods. Absolute tyrannical rulers gave way to absolute but enlightened rulers which then evolved into democracies although certainly there have been modern-day eruptions of authoritarians regimes based on corrupt philosophies like Fascism and Communism. I mentioned a tension between "property" and "personal" rights that now seems confusing (even to me). A better construct might be the tension between the "state" (the collective) and the "individual." To me, the two factors are on a continuum. Clearly, history has moved past - at least in some modern countries - one end of the continuum finding that absolute tyranny does not function to the benefit of the majority who have gained power; you advocate for the far side of the continuum (anarchy).
To my knowledge, there's been no historical or existing society that functioned using anarchical principals. You may see that continuum as one where it's desirable for humans to progress from one end to the other. I do not. In an earlier post, you indicated disagreement with a portion of what the Founding Father's wrote saying they:
Again, like them I would not move the pointer all the way to the right, where there are only individual but no collective rights. Like them, I accept the concept of taxation and the government that taxation supports. Why? Certainly the philosophers read by the Founding Fathers considered questions like human nature-and here I'd probably mimic them. Then, again, point to history. Certainly there remains enormous room for disagreement exactly WHERE on the continuum the optimal individual/government balance can be found (contrast the US with Europe) and how and in what amounts the taxes are to be assessed. Cultural factors play a large role in how any one country answers that question. But once the concept of taxation is accepted, the answer is only a matter of degree.
So I'd answer YES to this question "Are you saying people have a right to stolen money in the first place?" (that was NOT your response, I know) in connection with: Does someone who's fat and smokes have a "right" to my taxes when they have a heart attack?
Lots of stuff in there, so I'll try to organize my response and keep it short-ish...
First, I'll just say that philosophy is my main focus, because it's the cornerstone that everything is based upon. Philosophy is about knowing HOW to think...the difference between rational and irrational thought, logic and emotion, and how to spot errors in reasoning. If you begin with faulty or inconsistent reasoning, that is guaranteed to create problems, and often much worse problems than you might expect. I would rather follow the logic to an uncomfortable answer than hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously.
So with that said,
Rights - Philosophically, there can only be negative rights. You have the right to NOT be attacked, or stolen from, etc. but there can be no positive rights, because rights MUST be universally applied to everyone, and you can't do that with positive rights. If it places an obligation on another person, it isn't a right - It's actually a violation of their rights.
It must have been someone else, not me, who said healthcare is a right, because that is a positive "right". It is a claim that you have the right to force someone else to care for you, and you can't apply that universally. It completely contradicts your negative rights if someone else can force you to do things for them.
You also mentioned rights not existing in the past. Rights are not granted by others, but are inherent. They've always existed, but were simply violated or unrecognized in the past. Rights are timeless and borderless...if they weren't, you could have Country A say rape is illegal, and Country B says rape is legal, and both would be legitimate. Country A recognizes your right to decide who uses your body or not, and Country B says you don't have that right...so do your rights actually change just by walking over some line they drew on a map, or is Country B simply allowing violations of your rights?
Rules without rulers - I'm not sure how to sum this up very quickly. As I said in the last post, a ruler is someone who has "special rights" that nobody else has. For example, it's wrong for citizens to tax their neighbor on their own, because that would be theft...but the ruler is given an exemption from that rule. They have permission to do what would be considered immoral if done by anyone else. (See "special pleading" fallacy)
Rules can be enforced without anyone having rights that the others don't. Everyone has the right to self-defense, for example, so if the society generally accepts that rape is wrong but some guy tries to rape an innocent person on the street, it's within ANYONE'S rights to use force to stop the rapist. You could even have some organization of trained and qualified people that you call upon to help, but they wouldn't be "government" or a ruler...as long as they aren't given an exemption from the moral rules that apply to everyone else.
That's not a full explanation, and it's kind of tough to wrap your head around all the implications of it at first, but that might be a start.
I forget if I said this earlier, but here's my general rule of thumb - if it's wrong for you or I to do, it's also wrong for the government to do. Apply that to any situation.
Historical examples - There have been some minor examples of stateless societies (Ireland for a period of time, medieval Iceland, and maybe one or two others I'm forgetting) but none based on the non-aggression principle and respect for property rights, no. I believe there will be one someday, 100% (and possibly sooner than we'd think), but the philosophy has to become more prominent first. I've noticed it spreading pretty quickly over the past few years, and there are some pretty credentialed people adopting it, so we'll see.
The last thing I'll add is that if you look at history, you'll notice that the trend is generally from centralized power to more and more decentralized power. There's some fluctuation along the way, but the overall line on the graph would be towards decentralization and individual freedom. I think that's encouraging.
One interesting idea way I've heard it put is that rulers have become smarter over time. It began as direct rule and claiming their authority from a deity, and it has become more sophisticated. The comparison I heard was a farm that keeps chickens in cages vs. one that allows free range chickens. People are more productive and create more tax revenue when they believe they're free, and they produce less and are more prone to rebel if they are ruled too directly. In both cases, they're still owned by and subjects of the farmer (even if they can vote for who the farmer is).
Of course the disabled child had nothing to do with that. If we don't go single payer, how do we get the costs way down?
Of course you don't collect on Medicare until 65 since someone has been paying into it for years, essentially a government managed "savings account" in a big bureaucratic red tape pool. How is medicare funded if one can withdraw on it at 35?
Easy. We make the rich pay their fair share of taxes and end these ridiculous loopholes for these monster multinational corporations. We negotiate with the medical companies for cheaper prices, something other countries do, but we don't. That's all that needs to be done, and we can easily afford a single payer system and keep costs down. No one seems to realize this. A measly 00.5% tax on wall street speculation would give us free college. The money is already there, you just have to look for it.
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. There's nothing wrong with protection services, security, neighbors looking out for each other, being armed, having home security measures, or whatever people come up with. One idea I like for anti-theft is fingerprint access or retina scanning for valuable electronics, cars, etc. Lots of innovation can be made if the incentive is there.
